Amazing Race 21 – Ep 4 – C’Mon Twinnie!! Long, Strong and Hard!

A strange thing began to happen during this week’s Amazing Race – the team I think the show wants me to root for began to annoy me to epic proportions, while the team I think I am not supposed to like began to grow on me quite a bit. This phenomenon truly took form two other times in Race history. The first was the Charla/Mirna vs. Colin/Christie battle in Season 5. The world loved the cousin team, except for me. They were nails on the chalkboard whenever they spoke, and Mirna was just as much of a villain, if not more of one, than Colin. The worst things Colin did were to himself and his own team (i.e. almost going to jail for failing to pay a cabbie). I rooted hard for the girls to lose and for the intense Texan to win that season and would have loved for C&C Music Factory to have come back for All-Stars (supposedly Christie’s pregnancy held them back)

Again, in Season 7 I think we were meant to root against Rob/Amber and root for the snarky Lynn/Alex. Instead, I found the cattiness of the boys to be too much, while Romber ran far from a villainous Race. Their big villain moment – not stopping to check on Breg after their car crash. Which, in theory, was just racing. Again, I was against the grain on that one.

This season, I feel as if the editing wants us to root for the Twins. They are shown in such a way that I think the editors would like us to pull for their enthusiasm. But the opposite is working on me. I want to ram a sewing needle through my eye every time they talk. I am sick of every Sri Lankan reference they make – it’s like S7’s Ron constantly talking about Iraq. It’s becoming a drinking game. The ladies speak like a bad cheerleading squad all the time – specifically one which was erased of all memory and thought and are only now beginning to relearn the English language and require constant repetition to fire up the ole neurons in the brain.

Meanwhile, at one point the Twins called Team Apprentice a couple of idiots, and another time called them psychotic. Am I alone in wondering what > alternate amber-inundated universe they are living in? Nothing I have seen of Apprentice makes me think villain from those two. Even their self-proclamed intensity has yet to make its way on screen. In fact, they had an incredibly endearing moment during the Detour. When they chose to construct a mattress, they did so because of Abbie’s experience during her one year at the Fashion Institute. Ryan was wise enough to step back, praise her skills and tell her to tell him what to do. This was no alpha male ego problems taking hold here – it was team first. Now, I don’t know what those broad hand gestures they were doing at the beginning of the leg were all about. That was weird. I couldn’t tell if they were landing a plane, playing a bad game of charades with Phil or telling me I needed to steal second base.
Even Apprentice and the other teams have begun to grow tired of Team Twinnie’s…volume. During the Roadblock, several of them looked about ready to start shoving that bus spackle down the Twins’ constantly-open pie holes. The best part was Abbie’s fake gun blast to the head in the background as the Twins went on and on. > Their volume not only goes to 11 – it stays at 11. As George Carlin once said about the broken air conditioning – it’s either effin’ on, or effin’ off. Pick one. I pick effin’ off, please.

Anyway, the Race went from Indonesia to Bangladesh which could be renamed “The Country Without A Sanitation Department.” You know you’re country is filthy when the Amazing Race task assigned to your region is cleaning up dead rats. I mean, it doesn’t even have roads in some places in the capitol city! This leg may have featured the dirtiest inhabited city ever on the show. More than anything from India. At least, that’s the way it looked to me.

Speaking of the rats, the Hairs were the lucky team this week to take part in the Fast Forward. I still lament the loss of the weekly Fast Forward option. They had to go to three locations and collect several dead rats as part of the cleanup of the city’s vermin problem. You know you have a dirty city when the term “vermin problem” is used and reality show contestants are recruited to help out. The one thing interesting to me was that there really wasn’t much of a search for the rodent corpses involved. They were just kind of placed in a pot upon arrival at the location. I think it would have been some interesting visuals to have the two of them looking around the sewers and visible piles of trash looking for the bodies, or even better, have them chase them down and bludgeon them with their backpacks.

But they found the rats – the real rats, not the proverbial ones from the music industry – and made their way in first place. That FF finish kept Team Apprentice out of the top spot for the third time in four weeks. Make no mistake – they are going to be a force this season, barring some random event or unexpected unforced error. I can see them and Magic Mike battling it out down the stretch for the win. And how interesting would that be – Apprentice with a shot at $2 million. Only Sandra from Survivor has pulled that off and she had to starve herself for about 80 days to get that done
Meanwhile, Fantasy Island struggled. Again. Gary is a superfan – and as a fellow superfan, I appreciate that. And I have no idea how good or bad I would perform on the Race. My issues with directions would probably lead to some serious car meltdown at some point. However, Fantasy Island did not do well on anything in four legs. This was an overmatched team – and one that appeared defeated before this leg even began. I liked these guys a lot, but this was a very poor Race team.